American Culture

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American Culture
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• The development of the culture of the United
  States of America music, cinema, dance,
  architecture, literature, poetry, cuisine and the
  visual arts has been marked by a tension
  between two strong sources of inspiration
  European sophistication and domestic originality.
• At the beginning of her third century, nearly
  every major American city offers classical and
  popular music historical, scientific and art
  research centers and museums dance performances,
  musicals and plays outdoor art projects and
  internationally significant architecture.
• This development is a result of both
  contributions by private philanthropists and
  government funding.

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1. Literature

• In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
  American art and literature took most of its cues
  from Europe with writers such as Nathaniel
  Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe.
• By the middle of the nineteenth century, Henry
  David Thoreau established a distinctive American
  literary voice.
• In the century's second half Mark Twain and poet
  Walt Whitman were major figures Emily Dickinson,
  virtually unknown during her lifetime, would be
  recognized as America's other essential poet.

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• Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in
  Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993.
  Ernest Hemingway is the 1954 Nobel laureate.
• Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's The
  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and F. Scott
  Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsbymay be dubbed the
  "Great American Novel.

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1.1 Poetry

• Arose first during its beginnings as the
  Constitutionally-unified thirteen colonies
• Most relied on contemporary British models of
  poetic form, diction, and theme.
• However, in the 19th century, a distinctive
  American idiom began to emerge.
• By the later part of that century, when Walt
  Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience
  abroad, poets from the United States had begun to
  take their place at the forefront of the
  English-language avant-garde.

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• This position was sustained into the 20th century
  to the extent that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
  were perhaps the most influential
  English-language poets in the period during World
  War I.
• By the 1960s, the young poets of the British
  Poetry Revival looked to their American
  contemporaries and predecessors as models for the
  kind of poetry they wanted to write.
• Toward the end of the millennium, consideration
  of American poetry had diversified.
• Poetry, and creative writing in general, also
  tended to become more professionalized with the
  growth of creative writing programs in the
  English studies departments of campuses across
  the country.

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1.2 Comic Books

• Since the invention of the comic book format in
  the 1930s, the United States has been the leading
  producer with only the British comic books
  (during the inter-war period and up until the
  1970s) and the Japanese manga as close
  competitors in terms of quantity.
• Comic book sales began to decline after World War
  II.
• In the 1960s, comic books' audience expanded to
  include college students. The 1960s also saw the
  advent of the underground comics.
• Later, the recognition of the comic medium among
  academics, literary critics and art museums
  helped solidify comics as a serious artform with
  established traditions, stylistic conventions,
  and artistic evolution.

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2. Television

• There are three basic types of television in the
  United States broadcast, or "over-the-air"
  television, which is freely available to anyone
  with a TV in the broadcast area, cable
  television, and satellite television, both of
  which require a subscription to receive.

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2.1 Broadcast Television

• A decentralized, market-oriented television
  system.
• No national broadcast programming services.
• Local media markets with their own television
  stations.
• Stations may sign affiliation agreements with one
  of the national networks.

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• The three major commercial television networks in
  the U.S. are NBC and CBS and ABC.
• In big cities, affiliates of these networks
  almost always broadcast in the VHF band, which,
  in the days before cable became widespread, was
  premium real estate.

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• Major-network affiliates run very similar
  schedules.
• Saturday mornings usually feature network
  programming aimed at children (including animated
  cartoons), while Sunday mornings include
  public-affairs programs that help fulfill
  stations' legal obligations to provide
  public-service programming.
• Sports and infomercials can be found on weekend
  afternoons, followed again by the same type of
  prime-time shows aired during the week.

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2.2 Other Over-the-Air Commercial Television

• From 1955 until 1986, all English-language
  stations not affiliated with the big three
  networks were independent. Many independent
  stations still exist in the U.S..
• In 1986, however, the Fox Broadcasting Company
  launched a challenge to the big three networks
  and has established itself as a major player in
  broadcast television.

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2.3 Cable and Satellite Television

• Unlike broadcast networks, most cable networks
  air the same programming nationwide.
• Top cable networks include USA Network, ESPN and
  Versus (sports), MTV (music), Fox News (news),
  Sci Fi (science fiction), Disney Channel
  (family), Nick and Cartoon Network (Children's),
  Discovery Channel and Animal Planet
  (documentaries), TBS (comedy), TNT (drama) and
  Lifetime (women's).
• Cable-TV subscribers receive these channels
  through local cable system operators. By law,
  cable systems must include local over-the-air
  stations in their offerings to customers.

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• Today Direct broadcast satellite television
  services offers programming similar to cable TV.
• Dish Network and News Corporation's DirecTV are
  the major DBS providers in the country.

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• In 2008, Sky Angel became the first in the U.S.
  to launch a nationwide multi-channel platform of
  television programming.
• Currently, more than 70 channels of
  Christ-centered and family-friendly television
  and radio programming are currently available
  across the contiguous U.S..
• Subscribers do not need an outside dish or
  antenna to receive Sky Angel programming.

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3. Dance

• Great variety in dance in the United States.
• Home of the Lindy Hop, Rock and Roll, and modern
  square dance.
• A variety of social dance and concert or
  performance dance forms with a range of
  traditions of Native American dances.

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3.1 African American Dance

• Vernacular dances which have developed within
  African American communities in everyday spaces.
• Usually centered on social dance practice.
• characterized by ongoing change and development
  and their 'stealing' or 'borrowing' from other
  dance traditions.
• An important example Alvin Ailey and the Alvin
  Ailey American Dance Theater

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3.2 Swing Dance

• A group of dances that developed concurrently
  with the style of jazz music in the 1920s, 30s
  and 40s.
• The most well known is lindy hop.
• Now found globally

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3.3 Modern Dance

• Developed in the early 20th century.
• The early innovators Isadora Duncan, the dance
  company of Ruth St. Denis and her
  husband-partner, Ted Shawn, her pupils Doris
  Humphrey, Martha Graham.
• More of a way to express your feelings and
  emotions in a deep dance.
• Later choreographers Merce Cunningham, Alvin
  Ailey.
• Recently, Mark Morris and Liz Lerman have shown
  that graceful, exciting movement is not
  restricted by age or body type.

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4. Visual Arts

• Visual arts of the United States refers to the
  history of painting and visual art in the United
  States.

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4.1 Eighteenth Century

• Most of early American consists of history
  painting and portraits.
• Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of
  the newly elected government officials, while
  John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic
  portraits for the increasingly prosperous
  merchant class, and painters such as John
  Trumbull were making large battle scenes of the
  Revolutionary War.

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4.2 Nineteenth Century

• America's first well-known school of paintingthe
  Hudson River Schoolappeared in 1820.
• The Hudson River painters' directness and
  simplicity of vision influenced such later
  artists as Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who
  depicted rural Americathe sea, the mountains,
  and the people who lived near them.

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• Paintings of the Great West, particularly the act
  of conveying the sheer size of the land and the
  cultures of the native people living on it, were
  starting to emerge as well.
• Many painters who are considered American spent
  some time in Europe and met other European
  artists in Paris and London, such as Mary Cassatt
  and Whistler.

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4.3 Twentieth Century

• Controversy soon became a way of life for
  American artists.
• After World War I many American artists also
  rejected the modern trends.

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4.4.1 The American Southwest

• New artists colonies started growing up around
  Santa Fe and Taos, the artists primary subject
  matter being the native people and landscapes of
  the Southwest.
• Walter Ufer, Bert Greer Phillips, E. Irving
  Couse, William Henry Jackson, and Georgia
  O'Keeffe are some of the more prolific artists of
  the southwest.

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4.4.2 Harlem Renaissance

• In the 1920s and 30s a new generation of educated
  and politically astute African-American men and
  women emerged who sponsored literary societies
  and art and industrial exhibitions to combat
  racist stereotypes.
• Though the movement included artists from across
  America, it was centered in Harlem, and work from
  Harlem graphic artist Aaron Douglas and
  photographer James VanDerZee became emblematic of
  the movement.

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4.4.3 New Deal Art

• The first of these projects, the Public Works of
  Art Project (PWAP), was created after successful
  lobbying by the unemployed artists of the
  Artists' Union.
• The PWAP was followed by the Federal Art Project
  of the Works Progress Administration (FAP/WPA) in
  1935.
• Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant
  Wood, Ben Shahn, Joseph Stella, Reginald Marsh,
  Isaac Soyer, Raphael Soyer, and Jack Levine were
  some of the best known artists.

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4.4.4 Abstract Expressionism

• In the years after World War II, a group of New
  York artists formed the first American movement
  to exert major influence internationally
  abstract expressionism.
• It has always been criticized as too large and
  paradoxical, yet the common definition implies
  the use of abstract art to express feelings,
  emotions, what is within the artist, and not what
  stands without.

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4.4.5 After Abstract Expressionism

• During the 1950s abstract painting in America
  evolved into movements such as Neo-Dada, Post
  painterly abstraction, Op Art, hard-edge
  painting, Minimal art, Shaped canvas painting,
  Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of
  Abstract expressionism.
• As a response to the tendency toward abstraction
  imagery emerged through various new movements
  like Pop Art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement
  and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism.

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4.4.6 Other Modern American Movements

• Members of the next artistic generation favored a
  different form of abstraction works of mixed
  media.
• Realism has also been popular in the United
  States, despite modernist tendencies, such as the
  city scenes by Edward Hopper and the
  illustrations of Norman Rockwell.

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5. Theater

• Theater of the United States is based in the
  Western tradition, mostly borrowed from the
  performance styles prevalent in Europe.
• Regional or resident theatres in the United
  States are professional theatre companies outside
  of New York City that produce their own seasons.

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5.1 Early History

• The birth of professional theater in America may
  have begun with the Lewis Hallam troupe that
  arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1752. The
  Hallams were the first to organize a complete
  company of actors in Europe and bring them to the
  colonies.
• In the 18th century, laws forbidding the
  performance of plays were passed
• In 1794, president of Yale College, Timothy
  Dwight IV, in his Essay on the Stage, declared
  that to indulge a taste for playgoing means
  nothing more or less than the loss of that most
  valuable treasure the immortal soul.

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5.2 The 19th Century

• The Walnut is the oldest theater in America.
  The Walnut's first theatrical production, The
  Rivals, was staged in 1812.
• William Shakespeare's works were commonly
  performed.
• American plays of the period were mostly
  melodramas.
• A popular form of theater during this time was
  the minstrel show, which featured white actors
  dressed in blackface .
• Throughout the 19th century, theater culture was
  associated with hedonism and even violence, and
  actors (especially women), were looked upon as
  little better than prostitutes.

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• Burlesquea form of farce in which females in
  male roles mocked the politics and culture of the
  daybecame a popular form of entertainment by the
  middle of the 19th century.
• Criticized for its sexuality and outspokenness,
  this form of entertainment was hounded off the
  legitimate stage and found itself relegated to
  saloons and barrooms.

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5.3 The 20th Century

• Vaudeville was common in the late 19th and early
  20th century, and is notable for heavily
  influencing early film, radio, and television
  productions in the country.
• By the beginning of the 20th century, legitimate
  (non-vaudville) theater had become decidedly more
  sophisticated in the United States.
• More complex and sophisticated dramas bloomed in
  this time period, and acting styles became more
  subdued.

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• While revues consisting of mostly unconnected
  songs, sketches, comedy routines, and
  scantily-clad dancing girls dominated for the
  first 20 years of the 20th century, musical
  theater would eventually develop beyond this.

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• The massive social change that went on during the
  Great Depression also had an effect on theater in
  the United States.
• The years between the World Wars were years of
  extremes. Eugene O'Neill's plays were the high
  point for serious dramatic plays leading up to
  the outbreak of war in Europe.

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• After World War II, American theater came into
  its own. Several American playwrights, such as
  Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, became
  world-renowned.
• In the Sixties, experimentation in the Arts
  spread into theater as well, with plays such as
  Hair including nudity and drug culture
  references.
• In the late 1990s and 2000s, American theatre
  began to borrow from cinematic and operatic
  roots.

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5.4 American Theater Today

• Broadway productions still entertain millions of
  theatergoers as productions have become more
  elaborate and expensive.
• Notable contemporary American playwrights include
  Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, David
  Henry Hwang, John Guare, and Wendy Wasserstein.

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6. Cuisine

• The cuisine of the United States is a style of
  food preparation derived from the United States.
• The cuisine has a history dating back before the
  colonial period.
• With European colonization, the style of cookery
  changed vastly.
• The style of cookery continued to expand into the
  19th and 20th centuries

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6.1 Pre-1492

• Cookery style varied greatly from group to group.
  
• Nutrition was an issue for most hunting and
  gathering societies.

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6.1.1 Plant Foods

• The Native Americans had at least 2,000 separate
  plant foods which contributed to their cooking.
• Indigenous root vegetables included camas bulb,
  arrowhead, blue lapine, bitterroot, biscuit root,
  breadroot, prairie turnip, sedge tubers, and
  whitestar potatoes (Ipomoea lacunosa) along with
  the sweet potato and white potato.
• Greens included salmonberry shoots and stalks,
  coltsfoot, fiddlehead fern, milkweed, wild
  celery, wood sorrel, purslane, and wild
  nasturtium.
• Other vegetables included century plant crowns
  and flower shoots, yucca blossoms, tule
  rootstocks, amole stalks, bear grass stalks,
  cattail rootstocks, narrowleaf yucca stalks, and
  sotol crowns.
• Fruits included strawberries , huckleberries,
  blueberries, cherries, currants, gooseberries,
  plums, crab apples, raspberries, sumac berries,
  juniper berries, hackberries, elderberries,
  hawthorne fruit, pitaya, white evening primrose
  fruit, and yucca fruit.
• Nuts proliferated in the diet as well
• Legumes included peanuts, screwbeans, honey
  locust beans, and mesquite beans

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6.1.2 Land Animal Foods

• The largest amount of animal protein came from
  game meats.
• Large game included bison, deer, elk, moose,
  bighorn sheep, and bear, mountain lion, along
  with goat and pronghorn being found in the Rocky
  Mountains.
• The small game cooked included rabbit, raccoon,
  opossum, squirrel, wood rat, chipmunk, ground
  hog, peccary, prairie dog, skunk, badger, beaver,
  and porcupine.
• Game birds included turkey, partridge, quail,
  pigeon, plover, lark and osprey. Water fowl was
  quite abundant and varied, particularly on the
  coasts such as ducks, geese, swan, crane and sea
  crane.
• Other amphibious proteins included alligators and
  frogs, which the legs were enjoyed from,
  especially bullfrogs. Snail meat was also
  enjoyed, along with various turtles such as the
  painted turtle, wood turtle, and snapping turtle
  along with their eggs.

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6.1.3 Seafood

• Saltwater fish eaten by the Native Americans were
  cod, lemon sole, flounder, herring, halibut,
  sturgeon, smelt, drum on the East Coast, and
  olachen on the West Coast.
• Crustacean included shrimp, lobster, crayfish,
  and giant crabs in the Northwest and blue crabs
  in the East. Other shellfish include abalone and
  geoduck on the California coast, while on the
  East Coast the surf clam, quahog, and the
  soft-shell clam. Oysters were eaten on both
  shores, as were mussels and periwinkles.

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6.2.3 Vegetables

• A number of vegetables grew in the northern
  colonies, which included turnips, onions,
  cabbage, carrots, and parsnips, along with a
  number of beans, pulses and legumes. Pumpkins and
  gourds were other vegetables that grew well in
  the northern colonies often used for fodder for
  animals in addition to human consumption.

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6.2.4 Alcoholic Drinks

• Rum was the distilled spirit of choice as the
  main ingredient, molasses, was readily available
  from trade with the West Indies.
• Further into the interior, one would often find
  colonists consuming whiskey, as they did not have
  similar access to the sugar cane. They did have
  ready access to corn and rye, which they used to
  produce their whiskey.
• Hops only grew wild in the New World, and as
  such, importation from England and elsewhere
  became essential to beer production.